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Boston lockdown: The new normal?

There are worries that the lockdown effort contained an element of overreaction. | AP Photo

“There was a firefight out here last night: some 200 rounds and explosives,” Patrick said. “So we were very justified, based on what we knew about the investigation in taking what we knew was a big step.”

Experts said the decision to close down the city had less do to with direct threat to members of the public and more to do with allowing the police to focus on the Watertown neighborhood — the small municipality where they found Tsarnaev hiding in a boat on Friday night.

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Keeping city residents off the streets and businesses closed made it easier for Boston to send many of its police officers across the river to Watertown, where the Boston cops joined in house-by-house searches and helped keep up a perimeter so the Tsarnayev couldn’t escape.

“It’s preserving limited public safety resources to focus on this hunt,” former Homeland Security assistant secretary for intergovernmental affairs Juliette Kayyem said on CNN. “It’s really to relieve the pressure on public safety.”

Paul Rosenzweig, a former senior Homeland Security Department official under Bush, said he was stunned that there had been no successful, small-scale attacks in the wake of the 2001 strikes on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

While it’s still unclear whether Monday’s attack has roots abroad, Rosenzweig said he fears that it could be the leading edge of a wave of smaller-scale attacks on lower-profile targets in the U.S. “If they decide to go after soft targets, marathons, malls, college basketball games, a million other places Americans gather — the Iowa State Fair — those are all targets,” he said. “The problem we have faced and successfully dealt with for 12 years becomes a quantum leap harder and, frankly, the number of failures is going to get greater.”

Rosenzweig said the shutdown “may be overly broad, but they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t.”

“If they had a more narrow targeted shutdown and the suspect broke through the cordon and killed someone, there’d be a huge” wave of criticism from the media and the public, he said.

Former Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) defended the Boston lockdown but said there deserves to be some second-guessing of the decision for Obama to attend a memorial service Thursday before the bombers had been apprehended. The violence that played out late Thursday might have happened while Obama was in town, which would have left police split between protecting the president and subduing the alleged bombers.

“As you look back at it, I think people will think twice about it,” said the ex-senator, who served as chairman of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. “I’d say the next time, in a situation like this, I’d be cautious about convening a memorial service too quickly before we have some certainty about what’s going on, including bringing in the president of the United States.”